


Prowl Great Cain

by Lucky107



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Betrayal, Cannibalism, Gen, Graphic Description, Post-Apocalypse, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-07-29 10:23:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7680700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucky107/pseuds/Lucky107
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wonder if you'll ever get the chance to ask me why I turned you in—?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prowl Great Cain

**Author's Note:**

> Prowl Great Cain - the Mountain Goats - 2011

When they pass one another in the doorway, Martin's gloved hand catches Sonja's shoulder and halts her.

The look she gives him is sour, but it's nothing in comparison to the look she often gives Gareth for pulling the same stunt.  The intention in Martin's touch is vastly different from Gareth's and this grants him the benefit of the doubt.  He clarifies, "When you've got time, swing by the locker."

Sonja's hesitant - and Martin sees it - but she offers a curt nod.  "Sure.  But if you're goin' to speak with him, I might as well wait for you here.  He ain't in a good mood today."

Nobody is—not after the chaos caused by the most recent arrivals.

Martin flicks the bill of his cap and carries on inside, leaving Sonja to lean back against the corrugated paneling.  The shade of the old warehouse is a refreshing change from her courtyard perch and she's glad for a breather, even if she has to spend it with Martin.

"You still here?"  As she thought, it takes no time at all for Martin to reappear in the doorway.  "Good.  I just spoke to Gareth and I got the OK for a little scouting mission—you game?"

Wiping a couple of stray hairs from her sweaty face, Sonja nods.  "Yeah - yeah, I'm in.  What's up?"

They travel a natural path south and all the while, Martin speaks in a hushed voice.  The less people hear, the less people panic and the less people panic, the easier they are to control.  "I've been watching some movements just south of the gate and I think it's worth checking out."

Sonja climbs first and Martin follows right behind as they try to ignore the heat of a Georgian autumn afternoon.  The height of Martin's perch barely offers any relief given how open it is.

Their view offers the best overlook of the forest surrounding the compound - and Martin points absurdly in the direction of the tree line.  Sonja has to squint to follow his train of sight precisely.  "Watch right over there - you'll see it between the two big oaks."

And she does.

"All right," Sonja murmurs, retrieving her rifle from her back.  "Let's get down there 'n' check it out before it becomes more than just a thorn in our side."

\- - -

Sonja's never considered herself the violent type, but the rifle's weight feels right in her hands.  The comfort it provides is less about violence than it is about the security of knowing her well-being rests in her own hands, though.

A twig snaps at her back and Sonja glances back with a flinch, but she doesn't lift her rifle.

Behind her, Martin stumbles around with a willful blindness to his surroundings.  She's certain that this is the reason he brought her along, so in a whisper she scolds, "Be careful."  But Martin just looks at her like a child who has been slapped on the wrist.

"What, you see somethin'?"  He mocks, his patience wearing thin.  That carelessness makes him dangerous.  "I swear - hell, you saw it!  There was someone out here not ten minutes ago, and now there's nothing.  Not a trace."

Yeah, Sonja saw it all right - he made damn sure of it, too.

From their place on the perch they could see at least two figures rummaging about with a large duffle bag - the blue stood out against the dry greens and browns of the forest - and that made them a threat to the premises.  Whoever had been out here then is long gone now, though, and they're sitting ducks standing idle like this.

Kicking at the fallen foliage to leave a mark, Sonja adjusts her hold on the rifle before concluding, "They've moved on.  If they were headin' in, we would've met them at the gate."

"We can't just—"

Martin's cut short by the sound of gunfire - real gunfire - and it's coming from the direction of the compound.  While they both turn in an instant, Sonja's already running before Martin can question it.  "Light the fireworks!"  She hollers.  "We can't have them comin' our way!"

\- - -

Sonja arrives in time to catch a glimpse of the intruders - two men, a woman and a child.

She climbs eagerly up into Mike's perch, a rooftop that offers a good view of Boxcar A down below, and she takes a knee to get a look at their latest victims.  It's not something she's particularly fond of - and if it were up to her, she would never see the faces - but she needs to confirm her suspicion.

These are the people Martin saw in the woods.

"What happened?"  Sonja inquires.  "I was outside of the compound with Martin when we heard the shots - we just went out the gate.  A roundup?"

"An ambush," Mike corrects, uncharacteristically deadpan for a charming gambler.  He refuses to meet Sonja's expectant gaze when he adds, "Alex is dead."

Her grip tightens on her rifle and she whispers, "Jesus Christ."

Gareth's stony expression and firm tone down below betray the fact that he's just lost his baby brother.  Sonja checks her ammunition supply before giving Mike's shoulder a gentle, reassuring squeeze.  "They'll pay," she says.  "They always do."

\- - -

"Listen," Gareth says, roughly forcing Sonja's gun from her hand.

With evident frustration, Sonja parts with the weapon.  "Listenin'."

"We've made too much noise - we're in the eye of the storm," he reminds her coolly, his voice no more than a murmur on the hauntingly still air.  She understands this, but her frustration doesn't falter.  "If you go out there right now, you'll get yourself killed—or worse.  We need to use the biters to our advantage."

Sonja tilts her chin up just enough to look Gareth in the eyes, her snarl unpleasant and distrustful despite a lifetime of loyalty.

"Besides," Gareth adds, as though the sentimentality is an afterthought.  "We still need you.  I've got Cynthia radioing Martin as we speak.  He's already outside, so leave it to him."

The Gareth who sits high and mighty at the top of the hierarchy is not the man Sonja often sees when she looks him in the face.  Instead, she sees the friendly smile and kind, boyish eyes of the man who met her at the gate upon her arrival to Terminus.  Gareth has looked like a boy for as long as she's known him, but ever since the occupation of Terminus, he's been preoccupied with being a man.

"Martin's a fine spotter," Sonja agrees.  "But you wouldn't have questioned him if he had volunteered for the job just now.  I'm capable of handling myself—why do you always have to second-guess me?"

"Because I need you," Gareth insists.  "It's all about trust, Sonja."

With an aggressive and confrontational forward step, she demands, "You sayin' you trust Martin more than you trust me?"  If he says 'yes', she's more than ready to knock him one - and he knows she'd do it.

But he's not looking to fight, and he takes a defensive step back.  "No, of course not - but if we lose Martin, it's no skin off our backs.  We first—always."

For a moment, Sonja sees a light in his eyes—the faint traces of sincerity—and if the circumstances weren't so grim, he might have even found the nerve to smile.  It's the first time in a long time that Sonja's seen that smug look falter.

"Fine."

Gareth gives Sonja's shoulder a thankful pat before he turns to leave.

There's a lot to catch up on - and for Gareth, a lot to digest - with everything going on right now.  He's going to have his hands full without Sonja causing trouble, so he's trusting her to obey his order and remain inside the compound until given further instruction... and somehow, she continues to find ways to remind him how little his trust is worth.

\- - -

From the back of the shack, it's impossible to tell if anyone's inside.

Regardless, the stakeout ends with a misfit group of angry, hungry cannibals leaning up against the rotten boards and listening to the hollowness of their own shallow breathing.  There's no chatter - no whispers - coming from inside the shack.  The only sounds now are the sounds of the forest around them.

The sheer need to survive is, perhaps, the only thing that keeps any of them moving forward out of the fire.  No one knows what they're living for without a home, but they need to eat.

Carefully, Gareth leads the survivors along the right side of the old cabin.

The front entrance appears quiet, though the ground is littered with dead biters in varying stages of decay.  Mucky shoe impression on the front porch - splattered with thick, rotten fluids - indicate there was human life here not long ago.

With a simple and silent beckon of his hand, Gareth summons Albert to mount the front step and peek through the dusty window.  Being the youngest - and easily the least suspicious - of the survivors, he won't suffer too terribly if he finds himself face-to-face with the escapees.

At least, that's the logic behind the plan.

However, he returns in haste to confirm, "It's Martin!"

\- - -

The fire cackles loudly, drowning out the sounds of depravity and starvation.  It's a scary thing, the thought of dying alone and afraid with a big hole in your belly, but it's a very real thing for the remaining Terminus residents.

"Not tonight," Mike had said with a shadow of gratitude.

And Mike was right - after two consecutive days without a trace of food, they finally don't have to worry about going hungry.  At least for a little while, anyway.

That is, until their victim begins to laugh manically and confesses, "I was bit!  It's tainted—you've eaten tainted meat!"

In varying degrees, the concern rises up like smoke.  "Tainted?"  Theresa asks in a sharp panic.  "You mean, he was bit?  Why didn't anyone check him for injuries when you knocked him out?"  Given her prior medical experience, it's unsettling that she's the first one to speak out.

"You were the one preparing him!"  Martin says snidely, though the tremble in his voice is evidence that he doesn't really know which way to point his accusations.  "Jesus, man.  What are we going to do?"

Sonja stands by the fire with her chunk of lumpy, fleshy meat and listens on as the camp bickers about their next course of action.  It takes some time to work up the nerve to drop the meat into the fire and let it burn away, but Bob is right—if he was bit, there's a good chance that means everything they’ve eaten up until now is diseased.

When she turns to her companions, sullen and still quite hungry, she murmurs, "We're going to take him back.  We fucked up."

\- - -

"You... you let Martin live, even after what he did to that baby—that must've meant somethin', right?"

When The Ringleader turns to look Sonja in the face, his eyes seem to look right through her.  His head tilts to the left just enough to expose the monster within the man's clothing, gun drawn and ready.

Sonja swallows the lump in her throat because she knows what comes next: The Ringleader's eyes don't even leave her face as he lifts his silenced pistol and buries a bullet clean through Martin's eye.  From the edge of her periphery, Sonja can see the body drop like a stone, but she doesn't dare look away from The Ringleader's face.

 

When Martin arrived at the gates of Terminus, accompanied by a ragtag group of survivors he had met on the road, he stood alone in wanting to live—even if that meant consuming the flesh of the very people who had brought him there.

Nobody else was prepared to sacrifice their humanity to survive; Martin never thought twice about it and he never looked back.

 

"Jesus," Martin had sputtered through a bloody nose and a split lip.  He wouldn't have even been sitting upright if it weren't for Theresa's constant support.  "He damn near killed me over that baby, man.  I tried to give him a chance to walk away, but—"

—but that had always been Martin's downfall.

 

Gareth is the first to crash to his knees at the drop of the word, having surrendered his gun following the gunshot blast that claimed two of his fingers, and he orders his fellow survivors to do the same.  They trust him; he knows they'll listen to him.

But Martin didn't listen.

 

Martin never listened – and that was the thing about Martin.

Martin had been willfully blind right from the start because the survival of the group was trivial to him - even at the beginning, when they found him standing at the gate, his agreeable nature had been selfish at its roots.  Martin had his own agenda - he had always been ready to run at the first sign of danger, even if he sacrificed everyone else in the process.

So when push comes to shove, Sonja knows only one way to save herself—to save her family—and she sells Martin out to satiate the monster's bloodlust without a second thought.

Gareth and Theresa hold their breath as Sonja stares into the face of the beast with unrelenting force, as if daring him to swing that machete and travel that long, dark road of reprimand alone.  Oh, there's no such thing as forgiveness left in the world for them after the things they've done to survive, but The Ringleader is different.

Rick can still save himself.

His hand wraps firmly around the red handle of his machete, swinging like a pendulum—

"—Wait!"


End file.
